On the other side of the river, down in the reeds by the Saginaw, the Indian occasionally casts a stoic glance on the dwellings of his European brethren. Do not go imagining that he admires their works or envies their lot. For nearly three centuries by now the American savage has been in contest with the civilisation that presses on him and surrounds him, but he still has not learnt to know or esteem his enemy. In vain does generation follow generation in both races. Like two parallel rivers they have been flowing for three centuries towards a common abyss; a narrow space separates them, but their waters never mingle. It is not that the native of the New World is always lacking in natural aptitude, but his nature seems obstinately to repulse our ideas and our skills. Sleeping in his cloak in the smoke of his hut, the Indian looks with mistrust at the European’s comfortable house; he for his part prides himself on his poverty, and his heart swells and rejoices at the thought of his barbarian independence. He smiles bitterly as he sees us plaguing our lives to get useless wealth. What we call industry he calls shameful subjection. He compares the workman to an ox laboriously tracing out a furrow. What we call the comforts of life he calls children’s playthings or women’s affectations. He envies us nothing but our weapons. When a man can find cover at night in a tent of leaves, when he can find enough to light a fire to keep off the mosquitoes in summer and cold in winter, when his dogs are good and the country full of game, what more can he ask from the Eternal Being?
Tocqueville Göre Amerikan Zihniyeti
The emigrant from the United States is only interested in victory for its results; he holds glory but a vain clamour, and thinks that man has only come into the world to gain affluence and the comforts of life. He is brave, nonetheless, but brave by calculation, brave because he has found out that there are several things harder to bear than death. An adventurer surrounded by his family, but one who sets little store by intellectual pleasures and the charms of social life.
Indianlar ve Amerikanların Münasebeti
“But are you not afraid of the Indians?”
“Afraid of the Indians! I would rather live among them than in the society of the whites. No! No! I am not afraid of the Indians. They are worth more than we, provided we have not brutalised them with our strong drinks, the poor creatures!”
This said, the American made a sign to the Indian to come up and began to talk very fluently to him in his
language. It was strange to see what pleasure these two men, so different in birth and manners, took in exchanging ideas with one another. Clearly they were discussing the respective merits of their weapons. The white, having looked at the savage’s rifle very carefully:
“There is a fine carbine,” said he. “No doubt the English have given it to him to use against us, and he will not fail to do so as soon as there is a war. That is how the Indians draw on their heads all the ills that weigh them down. But they know no better, the poor fellows..”
Michigan-Kanada sınır hattındaki Amerikalılar ve Ojibwe (Chippewa) kabilesinin münasebetleri. Sınır hattında kültürlerin kaynaşması, İngilizler yerlileri kışkırtmaya devam ediyor.
Vikinglerin Bizans ile Ticareti
Dealings with Byzantium via the Black Sea went better for them. As regards raiding, although they suffered repeated heavy defeats from the better organized Byzantine forces, they also had the occasional profitable success, as noted above. The Primary Chronicle records, meanwhile, repeated and detailed treaties for trading, which must have carried on continually, except, perhaps, when a new Prince of Kiev decided he had to make a demonstration of his power and warlike skills. Trade with Byzantium must have profited both sides, for the Byzantines could ‘sell on’ to the Muslim world. It was profitable to the Rus as well, for their trade goods largely came free, extracted by force and extortion from the Slavic peoples in the basins of the Don and Dnieper. And furs were not the only, or perhaps even the most valuable, commodity first extorted and then traded.
Vikinglerin Toprak Edinme Yöntemleri ve Sosyal Uyum
So there remained land, the basic source of wealth in the European economy at all times up to very nearly the present. But this must have presented its problems, too. As previously noted, a large part of the Ragnarssons’ army decided they had done enough, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 877 (really 876) records flatly, ‘Halfdan [Ragnarsson] shared out the land of Northumbria, and they were ploughing and providing for themselves.’36 But the question that needs to be asked (but rarely is, for it can only be answered speculatively) is: who had previously owned the land they were ploughing? Dispossessing individual small farmers would be easy enough initially – obviously a small Yorkshire village, with maybe a dozen or twenty able-bodied men in it, could offer little resistance to a Viking army, or even a well-armed ship’s crew. But permanently dispossessing ‘peasant proprietors’, as they are called in academic language, would be a risky business. Peasant proprietors are deeply attached to their land – naturally enough, since it is their sole livelihood. Even if the previous owner of a farmstead was killed, there would be relatives, neighbours, runaways hiding out in the woods likely to retaliate. An ex-Viking living on his own in a farmstead could not expect to sleep easy – and living on his own, ploughing his own land as a bóndi or independent farmer, must have been the ambition of many Vikings. But after all the battles, there must have been many casualties among the Anglo-Saxon ‘thegnage’, the military aristocracy. Replacing them would be an easier business. A successful Viking might take over the land of a dead Anglo-Saxon thegn, perhaps retain the ‘home farm’, and then tell the ‘churl’ tenants of the former thegn that they were now his tenants, sharecroppers as they perhaps always had been. A wise Viking might even ensure that they got better terms from him than from their previous lord. An even safer target would be Church land, worked by tenants of a monastery or a cathedral. The monks were no longer there, nor the bishops – lists of Northumbrian bishops cease for a century or more. Their previous tenants might readily accept a mere change of masters, especially when they realized church tithes were no longer payable. Another factor is that dead thegns must have left many widows, as happened after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and daughters with no means of support. Military conquests are carried out by men, who in most cases do not have wives with them (apart from top men like Hastein). A natural solution is to marry into the relics of the native aristocracy.
Viking Yağmalarının Sürdürülebilirliği
loot from abbeys and cathedrals, cities and trading centres was the earliest and most convenient kind of profit, but it had the disadvantage of not being sustainable. Once a church treasury, with its accumulation of gold and silver over many years, had been looted, its plate melted down or cut up into shares, it would take many years for any accumulation to build again. Slaves were much more renewable (a development which the TV series on the whole ignores), and in Ireland this seems to have become the main reason for attacking church festivals and gatherings. Slaves could be very profitable indeed (as will be demonstrated later), but they had drawbacks too. They had to be guarded and transported. Worse, buyers had to be found for them – buyers with cash.
İrlanda’da Viking Yerleşimi
Ireland, meanwhile, remained divided, in a welter of splits and alliances. Nevertheless, from about the 870s, when Olaf returned to Norway and Ivar died, perhaps at Repton, a general pattern emerged. There was not much to be gained by the Vikings any more through raiding for accumulations of money and church treasuries: they had either gone or become much better defended. There was no prospect of land settlement except in limited areas under the control of the Viking ports, like Waterford, Wexford, Limerick and especially Dublin. Where there was still money to be made, it came from slaves, for whom there was steady demand from silver-rich Islam. So what grew up for several generations was ‘A delicate balance . . . between the Norse leaders and the Irish kings of the interior, whereby Dublin survived, for the most part, unmolested, and the Norse for their part desisted from serious attempts at conquest’.
Ragnarsson Kardeşlerin Tarihsel Varlığı
Having expressed the doubts and uncertainties, one can turn to the story as the Vikings’ descendants remembered it. Ivar, regularly nicknamed inn beinlausi, the Boneless, is agreed by all of them to be the leading Ragnarsson. Saxo adds an Ubbi, who does not appear in ‘Ragnar’s Saga’; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle adds the third of this trio, Halvdan, or, in Anglo-Saxon, Healfdene. It is this last item which takes us right out of legend and folktale into documented history (just like Hygelac/*Hugilaikaz), for the Chronicle was composed well within living memory of the events described, by someone who was extremely well-informed. In it, Healfdene appears several times between 871 and 878, while from 865 the Chronicle is completely preoccupied with the activities of the mycel here, the great army of Vikings, led in many other accounts (though the Chronicle does not name him) by Ivar. A vital link comes in the Chronicle entry for 878 – a crisis year for both Vikings and Anglo-Saxons – which records that a Viking leader was defeated and killed with 840 of his men by the local levies in Devonshire. It was obviously a heartening victory for the men of Wessex, whose king, Alfred, was at that time hiding out in the marshes of Somerset and trying to rally supporters (and in later legend, ‘burning the cakes’). Yet the chronicler does not know the Viking leader’s name. What he does say with certainty is that he was ‘the brother of Ivar (Inwær) and of Halvdan (Healfdene)’.24 One manuscript of the Chronicle adds, furthermore, that the levies also captured the Vikings’ ‘Raven’ banner,25 while the later Annals of St Neots (c. 1120–c. 1140) states that the leader was called Ubbi and that the banner was woven by the three sisters of Ivar and Ubbi. If the raven on it flapped its wings, the Ragnarssons would conquer; if it hung limp, they would lose.26 We don’t have to believe in magic banners to accept the general agreement that there were three brothers, Ivar, Halvdan and Ubbi, later identified as Ragnarssons, and that these men dominated the military scene in the British Isles as a whole for close to twenty years.
Vikinglerin Kafatasından İçki İçme Efsanesi
But while Magnús was a native Icelander, he was not skilled in the specialized diction of Old Norse verse and made several serious errors. In stanza 25, Ragnar says (looking forward to his afterlife in the house of Odin), ‘we will soon drink beer ór bjúgviðum hausa’, that is, literally ‘from the bowed, or bent, branches of skulls’. The ‘bent branches’ that grow from (OX) skulls are of course drinking horns, so Ragnar is just saying, ‘we will drink beer out of horns.’ But Magnús saw only the word ‘skulls’ and assumed it meant that Ragnar was looking forward to drinking out of the skulls of his enemies – a motif that has never since quite gone away.
Viking Etimoloji
The fact is that in the Vikings’ own language, Old Norse, víkingr just meant pirate, marauder. It wasn’t an ethnic label, it was a job description. And what this means for us is that if you come across headlines – as these days you very often do – which say something like ‘Vikings! Not just raiders and looters any more!’ then the headlines are wrong. If people weren’t raiding and looting (and land-grabbing, and collecting protection money), then they had stopped being Vikings. They were just Scandinavians. But while most Vikings were Scandinavians, most Scandinavians definitely weren’t Vikings, not even part-time.